If you have to be dragged back into familial distress, why not let a mythical plesiosaur do the tugging? In “Fossils,” an inventive entry in the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, a sighting of the Loch Ness monster forces a young scientist to confront her unhappy past. Narratively slight and at least a little nutty, this piece, created by the company Bucket Club, is deft in form and nifty in presentation.

Vanessa (Helen Vinten) is a hard-working, hard-thinking evolutionary biologist who probably sleeps under her desk. Her idea of a hot and heavy Saturday night? Arguing with creationists in chat rooms. Most of her research is deeply unsexy and involves experiments with the skin cells of a coelacanth, “a living fossil” of a fish, once thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago.

But an unusually clear image of Nessie upends her studious life. Journalists invade Vanessa’s lab with questions about the work of her father, a researcher obsessed with the monster, who went missing years ago. Eventually, she and her cheery Ph.D. student Dominic (Adam Farrell) light out for that lake of legend, where Vanessa will try out some advanced imaging technology and maybe come to grips with Dad’s disappearance.

To hold a fossil is to clutch a fragment of prehistory, and “Fossils” explores what remains — personally, zoologically — of times and creatures gone by. But the production tantalizes with, rather than delivers on, this theme. Running just over an hour and relying on only three performers (Luke Murphy, playing another doctoral student, is the third), it ends at least a scene too soon, before we get any sense of how Vanessa’s adventures will affect her life.

But let’s talk about how the ingenuity of “Fossils” might affect yours. (And Nessie’s. More than eight months have passed since anyone has reported a sighting, so she could use the publicity.) Bucket Club’s style mixes story theater and toy theater with both whimsy and rigor. The set consists of a couple of water tanks up front, along with a lot of plastic dinosaurs. At a mixing board in the back, the actors loop music and their own voices to make a wonderfully weirdo score, composed by the sound designer David Ridley. One instrument they use is a repurposed video game console that should have Léon Theremin giggling in his grave.

Under Nel Crouch’s direction, the performers manipulate stegosaurus figurines and act, score and narrate with scientific precision and obvious warmth. You probably don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster and you may not believe in “Fossils.” But you should have faith in these actors.